Interpreting Film Noir: Sidney Pollack’s The Interpretor and Alfred Hitchock’s Psycho
Saw The Interpreter.
Caught it at Fame, Andheri, where, I’m relieved to report, the projection is just as good as ever (I hadn’t been there for a few months, and if you recall, I grumbled recently about how Fun Republic’s projection has deteriorated).
Now, for some people the big name in that movie is Nicole Kidman. Maybe even Sean Penn.
Both those people, I like a lot.
But it’s the director that really gets my molasses flowing.
Sidney Pollack is one of my favourite ‘serious-entertainment’ movie makers in Hollywood.
In case you didn’t know it, his filmography includes gems like Tootsie, The Way We Were, Three Days of the Condor, Out of Africa, Absence of Malice, Sabrina, Random Hearts, The Firm, and Havana, among many others.
He usually acts in his own movies, as well as other movies – he plays Sean Penn’s boss in Interpreter, the balding, grey-haired bespectacled fellow who keeps telling Penn to go home, get some sleep, rest.
His films have a certain languid elegance that makes you want to just switch off your brain and watch, knowing you’re in good hands, that this person will not lead you astray into schlocky Hollwood territory, nor will he drown you in pretentious intellectualism.
There are guns in his movies, but even if they’re fired in the course of the movie, it’s what’s said before and after that’s more important.
To put it another way, the words used by the characters and the things they say and mean, are more important than stuff like bullets and bras and brass bands.
Take Interpretor, for instance. It’s a very good film.
Not a great one, because it doesn’t aspire to that status. To be a great film, it would have to use real names, real places, real people.
And that would be a story too big for the commercial film format in which Pollack works.
That’s also typical of Pollack. He aims big, but not for the sky.
And that’s just enough.
He makes these wonderfully serious, slickly turned out, entertainingly crafted little gems that deliver a couple hours of thoughtful entertainment.
And occasionally, he gives you a moment or two, or a half-dozen, that are pretty amazing.
In this film, he gives you a dozen-odd ones, mostly with Nicole Kidman stealing the show, and Sean Penn underplaying his talents to provide a perfect foil to her – in short, playing ‘heroine’ to her ‘hero’ in a sense and doing a brilliant job of it.
(To really know what Sean Penn can do, of course, you need to watch a whole bunch of other movies which showcase his talent much, much better than Interpretor.)
In the end, Pollack leaves you feeling like you watched a movie, a good old-fashioned movie that yes, is designed to entertain you, but is aimed at entertaining an intelligent viewer.
Incidentally, I also happened to see a classic thriller that also has a major scene set in the United Nations Building, New York – although, ironically, that film’s director was flatly denied permission to shoot in the UN building and was forced to resort to building a set.
The film, of course, was Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock’s noir classic.
The amazing thing about it is how fresh and contemporary it seems even today.
I was actually trying to get my 16-year old son Ayush to watch it, and he was very reluctant.
I told him, ‘Check it out for five minutes, if it bores you, walk.’
Fifty minutes later, he was still sitting there, still watching.
The shower scene had just come and gone, the film’s main lead, the Janet Leigh character, had just been brutally murdered.
He wanted to know, What the hell happened next?
But just knowing who-did-it or what-happened-next wouldn’t have been enough.
It took that glorious musical score, that compelling script and direction, those wonderfully designed camera set ups and shots, the little details (like the highway patrolman who never takes off his sunglasses, and remains one of the most menacing images in cinema history, even though he never actually does anything even remotely menacing: it’s all in the look.
If you haven’t seen Psycho, you don’t know what you’ve missed.
Look past the black & white, look past the old-fashioned cars and paraphernalia. Even look past the word “classic”.
Just see it as a great thriller. The grandfather of film noir, a tradition in which even Sidney Pollack follows (although very very loosely, I hasten to add – for real noir, see Bruce Willis’s new starrer, Sin City: Now that’s great noir – more about that soon).
Even today, even in the fifth year of the 21st century, when film makers as gifted as Sidney Pollack are continuing to turn out Hitchockian tributes like The Interpretor, Psycho still holds its own.
(I also saw North by Northwest recently, and that’s terrific too, but Psycho is still leagues ahead.)
Heck, see them both. You know what they say, you can never read too many (good) books, see too many (great) movies, or listen to too many (terrific) albums.
The Interpretor qualifies as a pretty good watch, and Psycho continues to rule the roost as a great watch.
This entry was posted on Monday, July 25th, 2005 at 6:11 pm. It is filed under Ashok.
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